Minecraft, and in particular Minecraft Portable Edition in single-player mode, which is what I do, is much lower-overhead than SL. Tiny computer that I always have with me, no noisy fans or tangly power cords to deal with, no other persons to worry about rudely ignoring or suddenly logging out on, usw.

Of course there’s also orders of magnitude less stuff to do, and no interesting people to interact with whilst doing it. :) But there we are. It fits nicely into the tiny slivers of time that I seem to have lately (in contrast to the richer but rarer larger chunks of time which favor SL).

Attentive readers who have read even postings that I may never have gotten around to writing may recall the problem we’ve always had in MCPE with animals going aquatic.

That’s an old picture of some sheep and cows swimming about in one of the seas, where they are hard to shear or milk, and look silly. (I suspect a bug or roundoff error or something in the animal-wandering code in MCPE, that causes them to tend to stay near the edges of the map, which is where my seas are.)

The other day I got tired of this, as well as tired of mining way down deep in the mines for awhile, and built some fences and stuff. And viola!

That is the brand new Animal Enclosure (or whatever the agrarian name is) out at The Farm, featuring a number of captured sheeps and cows and chickens. And the Enclosure out at Lonely Lake:

which so far has just sheeps.

It is now Much Easier to collect eggs and milk and wool and whatnot (no more swimming or skindiving involved).

Known renegade animals include one Piggy seen deep in the interior the other day, and one last swimming sheep ‘way ‘way off at the edge of the map:

They will be assimilated! Maybe eventually!

(Also, MCPE players who haven’t yet should try hitting a grassy ground square with Bone Meal. Woot! I did this by accident, and was delighted. Also, hitting the leaves of a tree with the Sheep Shears is good.)

Now in fact being able to more easily get Milk and Eggs and Wool isn’t necessarily a Good Thing, since I already have lots of stuff of all sorts, and not necessarily enough places to keep it. Sort of like SL! And RL for that matter!

Most of my Chests are scattered here and there around the world, and full of unsorted and unlabeled Stuff (mostly Cobblestone). Here is the rather cluttered storage area of the Main Desert Base, for instance:

(At least we have double-size chests now!)

Finding anything in them is hard, as is trying to move stuff between them in order to give some semblance of organization so as to make it easier.

Walking down some long bare-walled hallway the other day, I for some reason pictured to myself an amusing scene in which the hallway was lined with little Shopping Mall style stores, with windows and doors and display cases and signs and stuff. (H&M Lonely Lake; big sale today only!)

I started fiddling around and actually building one last night just for grins, and once I’d done that and stepped back from it I was suddenly (thunder) struck with the realization that this could actually be Incredibly Useful for organizing things!

So here is what that first store looks like now:

and you can guess what is in the chest inside. :) The little Nether Reactor Core to the left is just for decoration.

And having done that and been Extremely Pleased, I started making and filling more spaces in that long hallway (between the Desert Mine and Lonely Lake, the long way not the shortcut) with other marked chests, f’rinstance:

and now the upstairs chests are no longer all cluttered with string and bones (and I’ve reserved a big area down there for chests full of Cobblestones), and I can eventually get rid of some of the chests up there so as to have more space for Palatial Thronerooms or whathaveyou.

Woot! :)

Almost inspires me to start boxing up stuff in SL, rather than carrying all eighty-five thousand (literally) things in inventory all the time.

2 Responses

I love the idea of having wee shops for your inventory – very cool :-D

I’m still playing MCPE, largely because my 7yo (and now my 3.5 yo) is/are but also because a few of my old SL mates are playing on a MCPE server one of them has set up – there me, Osprey, Salazar Jack & Enjah Mysterio and we are playing in a forest map that is not unlike the old Kahruvel Forest Sal had on the mainland. You can read more over on my G+ account here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/chhtfe7gdlsqrs98fhstb62l8h4?authkey=CICylc3QzeG_yQE

MCPE’s animals are set for an IQ boost in the next update (0.8.0 – out in Nov I understand) and hopefully that will make them less derpy. also 0.8.0 will start to see the game move towards using redstone and hopefully accessing multiplayer more easily & reliably.

By the by, did you ever try the Survivalcraft game? That has had a huge number of upgrades recently and the animal AI in that is amazing – path finding, fear & injury response, call/beckon/ride mechanics… just brilliant! And I think you’d like to experiment with the electricity & logic gate systems as you can build some complicated things. All we need next are moving blocks such as pistons & carts and you could easily (I use that word cautiously) set up a complicated roller coaster ride :-D Oh, and the ability to change between creative & survival modes at will is worth the price of admission alone!

ooh, inneresting, thanks for the news! I haven’t tried Survivalcraft (or multi-player MC of any kind); I am currently strictly rationing the number of new complex things I get involved with. :) It would be great to have Redstone do something in MCPE / iOS, though, as I have all of these Redstone deposits hanging in the air in all my mines, waiting for there to be some reason to mine them.

How long until MC(PE) gets a full Turing-complete scripting language for the blocks, I wonder…